I was having a debate with someone last week about global warming. His stance was: “does it matter?” Well it matters to polar bears who are drowning and puffins, which are losing their nesting sites.

And this year, depending on which figures you believe, has been the hottest, or the second-hottest, on record. And so have nine of the last ten. (And the extra one in that set is 1990.)

Surely no one can now doubt the climate, not just the weather, is changing, fast.

As I look out the window on this crisp, clear December morn, I don’t see a poor man gathering winter fuel, but I do see, in the eighth of the sky visible from my window, one jumbo jet turning right into Heathrow (there’ll be another along in about two minutes) and the clear vapour trails of seven other planes and a smaller plane heading for the City airport. That can’t continue.

The Observer reports today on a television programme certain to provoke a storm.

Laura-Anne Hanrahan is sitting on her doorstep, playing with a pumpkin as she describes how she felt when her boyfriend kissed her.
‘Tingly,’ she says, dreamily. ‘He used to come over and cuddle me and put his hands up my top. It used to feel cosy. I feel desperate to go up to him and say “Ben, why don’t we kiss any more”. It hurts so much that we don’t kiss that I want to rip my heart out and throw it away.’
Laura-Anne, from Siddick, a two-street village near Workington in Cumbria, is nine years old…
Although the programme is not sexually explicit, Steven told The Observer he first had full sex when he was 11, and had been several times to the family planning clinic. All the children said they had their first ‘proper kiss with tongues’ when they were six or seven.

You can already see the Daily Mail et al going ape over this, but it is a documentary, and it is reality. The reaction in this story is all talking about the sexualisation of children by society, but the fact is that children this age are, in large numbers, starting puberty, the hormones are flowing, and this is what is going to happen.

When I look back to this age at primary school, well it wasn’t so much age nine (fifth grade), but certainly by sixth grade (roughly age 10) talk about the other sex, about puberty etc, was a huge part of the school day. (Although come to think of it in fourth grade there was a lot of fuss about a boy in the class who had a mild mental disability. The cruelty of children: the claim was that he had “VD” and that if you touched him you would catch it. I don’t think anyone knew what VD was, but there were posters on the train about it.)

My nickname in sixth grade was “bra baby” because I was the first to wear one – and that was because I had to, although several others quickly followed suit with “training” bras. And there was one girl – the class rebel – who reportedly took payment to let others watch as she kissed her boyfriend in the sheltered area behind the loos.

That was thirty years ago, so you can’t blame any recent “sexualisation of society”.

I can see how it is hard for parents to acknowledge what is happening, but if they don’t provide sex education and give children the tools to work through what is going on, the results won’t be pretty.

There have been 776 winners of Nobel Prizes – for physics, chemistry, medicine, literature and (more recently) economics – since they began in 1901. Yet were they recognition for astounding, outstanding individuals, or parts of teams and milieus that happened to be picked out of a communal project?

That’s the central question of an exhibition that has just arrived at the British Library, Beautiful Minds, the Centennial Exhibition of the Nobel Prize.

One view starts the exhibition, that of Sir Alexander Fleming: “It is the lone worker who makes the first advance in a subject: the details may be worked out by a team, but the prime idea is due to the enterprise, thought and perception of an individual.” Yet further on you go back to Lucretius in 55BC: “Nothing can be created out of nothing.”

The story certainly begins with one man, the founder of the prizes, Alfred Nobel, who invented dynamite in 1867. He proved himself not just an inventor – with more than 300 patents to his name, for goods ranging from artificial silk to aluminium boats – but a brilliant businessman, growing his explosives empire to nearly 100 factories around the globe. Some of their products – or at least one hopes only their packets – are on display. READ MORE

From Printing and Parenting in Early Modern England, DA Brooks (ed) Ashgate, 2005.

For writers and critics who bemoan the commercialisation of the literary world: “Andrea Alciati is usually given credit for ‘inventing’ the emblem in his Emblemata (1531), but in fact, as Rosalie Colie astutely notes, Alciati ‘began simply by combining two short forms, adage with epigram: it was his publisher [Heinrich Steyner] who conceived the idea of adding figures, or woodcut pictures’ in order to make the text more accessible, and thus more marketable.” p. 198
(The “first English emblem book” is credited to Geoffrey Whitney, sister of Isabella.)

Print as a corrective to manuscript:
“Abraham Fraunce prefaces one of his books with a dedicatory epistle, explaining that he was forced to publish the work himself because it had been so terribly distorted by manuscript circulation … the heroine of his story is figured as the reader of the book, who would prefer an accurate text of her lover.” p. 202

This blog and others have previously had interesting discussions about “monstrous births”. This collection has an article about them, including an interesting predecessor in Martin Luther’s writings which “included two woodcuts depicting a ‘monk-calf’ and a ‘pope-ass’ in a 1523 pamphlet whose features were meant to suggest, by analogy, the monstrosity of the papacy.” p. 228

The origin of the “red letter days”
In almanacs that used red ink “to announce feast days, commemorated the anniversary of the monarch’s birth or accession to the throne, noted the shift from first quarter to full moon, marked the start of the four legal terms and ‘dogdayes ende'” p. 239

There’s also a article on the annotations on Anne Clifford’s copy of A Mirror for Magistrates, which gives a fascinating insight into the persona of a scribe of the time …
“There are at least three hands discernible in the marginalia. The principal one … that of Clifford’s secretary William Watkinson, whom she refers to as her ‘chief writer’ during the last years of her life … She dictated the diary to him, as she dictated most of the marginalia. And like a true Renaissance secretary, Watkinson wrote in whatever persona was required. For some narratives, the heading he provides takes the form ‘This was read to your ladyship on such a date at such a place’; some are headed, ‘This your ladyship read over yourself on such a date,’; but in some, Watkinson disappears, and the heading reads ‘This I read myself on such a date’ and even ‘This was read over to me on such a date’ – Watkinson’s mistress at these moments speaks through him, just as she does when he writes her correspondence in the first person.

But there is a second hand which also writes ‘This I read on such a date’, a rather shaky italic hand. This hand also makes more personal comments, noting particular passages for emphasis or praise: ‘A good verse’; ‘Marke this’. This is Clifford’s own hand; she was taught the italic that ladies used, and in her youth it was a careful, very controlled hand … By the age of 80 she had less control over it, and in a few places seems to require help in completing her marginalia .. which she gets not from Watkinson, but from someone with a less professional scribal hand. The personae throughout the book shade into each other as Clifford’s sense of herself incorporates her servants, and as they ventriloquize her voice.” p. 275-77

There is in that passage, I think, something very deeply significant about the different nature of identity then – at least perhaps of aristocratic identity.

My latest blood donor magazine has some doozies:

* Claret-coloured blood suggests haemoglobin may be leaking from the red cells, a natural process of aging. (So you get less blue-blooded with age?)

* If you had a fatty meal the night before your blood might be pinkish – probably not good if you’re trying to impress the nurse!

* Some oral contraceptives turn your plasma bright green (no they don’t say which ones), while self-tanning pills can make it flourescent orange.

So does this mean you glow in the dark?

* Downward social mobility in China: a Ming dynasty mansion sees probably the last generation of its builders’ family. I think of travelling around Xian 10 years ago. The roads were all blocked with building materials for new houses. In the countryside at least, it is probably still another generation before the Chinese start treasuring and restoring such treasures.

* The media is still hounding Joanne Lees. She was the victim of a terrifying attack, showed great courage to escape and save herself, knowing her partner had been killed. And yet you still get ridiculous headlines like this, “jury still out”. NO IT ISN’T. A Northern Territory jury, who knows its own very well, has found that Bradley Murdoch killed her boyfriend and subjected her to the ordeal she described. A judge made it VERY clear he believed her. Yet on Monday coming out is a book questioning the verdict. Pure sensationalism – but then you learn it is from a Daily Mail journalist – so a good dose of misogyny mixed in too.

* Turkey is teetering on the brink of what could be an enormous step: Could it really become part of the EU? (What a wonderful thing that would be if that happened – a great blow to the “clash of civilisations” thesis.) But as the trial of Orhan Pamuk shows it still has a long way to go.

* American tactics in Iraq: “A 30-year-old Oxford graduate with no public relations experience has been handed a $100m contract by the Pentagon – to plant false stories in Iraqi papers.” So, that’s what you call encouraging democracy?

* Finally, the death of a brave man. This was the only story I found identifying a teacher killed in Afghanistan for daring to ignore Taliban threats to stop him educating girls. He is recorded by the single name Laghmani. You can only hope, perhaps against hope, that another teacher will step up to take his place.